


Sensitive Skin, Thin Ice, and Delirium

by jazzetry



Category: GOT7
Genre: A Bit Self-Indulgent, Alternate Universe - Skating, Angst, Bad Parenting, Child Neglect, Childhood Friends, Confused Mark Tuan, Eating Disorders, Emotional Baggage, Emotionally Repressed, Ice Skating, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Mark Tuan-centric, Mild Language, Panic Attacks, Slow Build, Slow Burn, a bit of casual swearing, as in some parts can be read as a panic attack, but really briefly - Freeform, but you could really see it as a metaphor, floaty imagery, jackson's a working man, like inordinate amounts, mark's siblings are here, maybe just a few mentions of the actual thing, nothing is too graphic, really the only important tuan sibling is joey, too much figurative language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:54:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23372017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzetry/pseuds/jazzetry
Summary: Icy fingertips dance sensually across bare skin, tickling feathery hairs and alerting sharp nerves in short bursts of fiery cold. A hot breath bats along the trails of where the fire burns through and puts it out into nothingness.It leaves a trail of emptiness and sweltering vertigo and a spidery pattern below him.Or, in which Mark has to find a way around his passionless skating and finally faces his past traumas with the help of a friend he hasn’t seen since high school.
Relationships: Mark Tuan/Jackson Wang
Comments: 9
Kudos: 73





	1. Cold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cold. Ice. Frozen. Wintry. 
> 
> Cold. Distant. Apathetic. Lifeless.

His routine feels practiced, his feet moving to do the jumps and spins without a single stumble, the rest of his body following suit not even a second later. It’s not some spectacular display of grandeur wracking his body until he’s no more than an abstract cartoon, a dramatized version of him that no one can possibly become. He’s technically correct, landing complex jumps without as much as a stumble. Even still, his coach is berating him from the side of the rink. 

“Put more effort into it, you’re  _ boring _ me to sleep _ , _ ” the older man says, the light panels almost a mile above their heads casting a dark shadow over icy eyes. The round vowels and harsh r’s clash into a notably foreign accent, one that somehow still manages to make him jump.

He does it again. And again. And again. 

_ And again.  _

Until he’s draped over a hockey bench, breathing for air as if it’s the last thing that makes him feel human. Like he’s about to take his last. He doesn’t. He’s still alive, and he can still move. So he stands up to try it again. Put something into his routine that he knows he can’t achieve.

“Hold on. We’re done for the day,” and without another word of warning the coach stands up from his side, and walks out, taking with him the mere concept of practice.

~~

Mark has been skating for well over half of his life. Sure, he’s getting up there in age, especially when he sees the other much younger skaters skirt past him with a youthful vigor he doesn’t even know if he’s experienced before, but he’s not yet shown signs of aging, even when compared to younger competitors. 

He tries not to let his anxiety show, as he makes his way through the room all the competitors have been deigned to reside in, with all their competitors, until it’s just about their turn to go up. He’s saving the abject fear for the younger competitors who look scared out of their minds. 

Despite his apparent age advantage, nothing prepares Mark for the performance or the crowd or the cameras or his coach’s watchful eye from where the lights perfectly illuminate the older man’s face to show the eyes and a neutral scowl. He skates in on complete and utter silence, drowned out only by his rapid heartbeat jumping through his rib cage and the thumping bouncing up and down the frills on his chest. 

He doesn’t look nearly as scared as he feels when he skids to a halt at the direct center of the rink, leaving a large scar on the ice behind him, and looking down at his feet in perfect immobility.

And then he jumps to life at the fast-paced music, doing axels and loops and salchows and flips; doubles and triples and back-to-back combinations; sit spins and camels and uprights and all the combinations his coach had put on paper. Everything he practiced, he puts into this. This almost large-scale competition where all he has to do is beat out the less technically advanced competitors who can’t even imagine doing a death drop so unnecessarily. 

Applause. Then he leaves. He doesn’t return until he wins another gold medal.

~~

“Oh,” is all Mark can manage the next time he walks into the rink on his own, to practice on his own volition, and he sees that, instead of the crotchety old man that looked like he would rather jump into a vat of molten lava than be stuck behind the counter for another second, there’s a kid around his age behind the counter. He sets his things down on a bench and looks up to the young man from where his stuff is, “What happened to… uh, Rich?” he asks, not remembering the dude’s name despite having skated here for at least ten years now.

“It’s Rick, actually,” the guy says cheekily, smiling droopily as he leans on the counter, “Why? You don’t like me already?”

“No, it’s just that—“

“Nah, I’m joking. Mark, right?” said male nods and waits for the other man’s response. Instead of an actual response, the new guy just talks to himself, “Yep, I thought you looked familiar.”

Alright, so Mark didn’t expect the young, strong-looking asian man with barely frosted tips to be into figure skating, but he’s not there to judge. He asks, “Why?”

“Your last name’s Tuan or something like that, right?”

“Yes,” skepticism laces his voice, as if he’s paranoid about whatever this random guy has to say to him. 

“Yo, dude! We totally went to school together!”

And then he remembers. The wide-eyed foreign kid with a burning passion for anything he even came across, looking at Mark with so much curiosity that he’d think the kid hadn’t ever met another person. What was his name, Josh? Jake? John? The name is barely at the tip of his tongue, burning where the letters feel right

“Oh right,” Mark says after stroking a fake goatee in his mind, “You’re… John, right?”

“Gosh, I forgot how bad you are at names. Do you really not remember who I am?” the other man responds, shaking his head before smiling again, “I’m Jackson, remember?”

Mark ignores the recognition pouring over his body, says a curt, “Right,” and swiftly changes the subject, “Now, can I go and skate now?”

“Alright, how long?”

“Three hours.”

And then he takes off, hurrying to tie his skates and get onto the ice.

Strangely enough, he doesn't feel lonely. Not nearly as much so as when he’s standing out on the scarred ice, breathing through the breathlessness of a well executed performance, and hundreds of people look down at him from the risers, just watching him stand.

Maybe it’s the sense of familiarity that tears through years of nonstop skating and reminds him that he’s still a person. That he still had a life before this and that he still should.

But it’s not trying to rip himself out of his long fought routine and making him feel nostalgic for something he didn't know ever existed. He feels weird, like he's trying to rekindle a flame that he’s let run out ever since he left school years ago despite the constant downpour that’s plagued him since he became a professional skater.

He goes out onto the ice.

~~

The sun’s barely risen, leaving a hazy fog cascading down the entire street where the only guiding light are dim street lamps becoming dimmer as the sun slowly peeks over the horizon. The bits of water droplets in the air mix with sweat to create a tepid saline that drips down Mark’s face and back into his hair and neck as he runs through the humid morning.

“Your next event is going to be crucial for the development of your career,” the coach says one day, halting Mark’s cardio warm up at once, “I've already sent you a copy of the song I think will be most fitting. But this time, we’re changing how we do this. You’re going to choreograph your routine.”

Somehow, with such little detail, Mark is left with more questions than answers, and he asks the most urgent one, “Are you still going to help?”

A deep throaty laugh is what sends Mark flying upward to stand up perfectly straight. He looks to the older male, his eyes trained on the slight ridges on the man’s forehead rather than the pale blue eyes that nearly pierce his skin. 

“Yes, yes, of course. What do you pay me for?” the accented voice enunciates, “Now let’s go, we’ve got to think up an idea.”

Mark nods, grabbing his things before they walk back to the rink. 

“So, is there anything you’re planning for this?” Mark asks, curious about this sudden turn of events.

“No,” the coach looks back at him, “This is your routine. You’re leading the project. I’ll just help guide you there.”

It’s not like Mark hasn’t contributed to his own routines, it’s just that he only makes adjustments after he learns the moves he’s told and they’ve all been minor changes. Maybe he’ll instinctively change the position of his arms as he crossovers backwards into a spread eagle. Or he’d change the pancake spin into a cannonball. Maybe he’d opt for a double-triple combination instead of a double-double. 

Regardless, they’re all minor changes that they can work out in the process. Creating his own routine to a song he still has yet to hear feels much more daunting than even performing in front of a physical crowd of a few thousand and a digital crowd of a few thousand more. Even disregarding the importance of this performance, Mark feels out of his league.

He’s not sure if he can do this.

~~

Jackson’s behind the counter again, but neither of them speak to each other. Instead, as Mark ties his skates on a bench a fairly short distance away from the counter, Jackson winks when Mark looks up to enter the rink. 

“So, what are we doing today?” Mark asks, his skates scratching gently along the smooth surface as he scrapes a thin layer of ice loose. He drives his toepick into the ground, clasping his hands in front of him with no knowledge of which position to stand feels most comfortable. 

Without answering, the coach puts a blank DVD into the player, “We’re working on your routine.”

Swiftly after the older male stops talking, the speakers come alive. 

Mark expects a large swell that crescendos into his cue to start moving from his beginning pose before the music shoots to life. The tinniness of the rink’s old speakers would muffle the bass and higher notes, but the midtones are the key player. They twinkle in parts. A lone violin, then an orchestra. 

But instead, he can hardly hear the beginning as the music comes to life. It’s only evident when the increasingly shrill, vibratoless violin becomes just loud enough for its constant note to ring out through the rink. He then hears a swell of the string orchestra before the tension resolves into flowing music.

There’s emotion. Something so deeply heart wrenching that, even through the awfully tinny speakers, Mark can feel it. An act of artistry that sounds so much like a musician trying to take the emotional silence and wring it until all that’s left is emptiness, but it feels so utterly jarring, especially when Mark plays his previous routines in his mind. 

Emptiness. There’s something so profoundly cold and hollow that comes along with the breaks in music, and suddenly, he can feel the cold air hanging off of the ice rink swallow his entire body until he doesn’t know what to feel.

“Do you have any ideas?” the accented voice picks up where the music fades into obscurity and Mark can’t tell if it’s over or not.

The ice is begging for attention, to be painted over by skates with an intent, by something meaningful. But nothing comes to mind.

~~

Skating is not a team sport. 

Skating has no warmth. No sunlight.

Skating is hard. It’s rigorous. It’s demanding. And it’s anti-social. 

Mark doesn’t make friends in his years of ice skating. All he gets are cuts and bruises along his legs from hard falls on jagged ice.

Skating is cold.

Skating is lonely.

And it’s been drilled into his brain since he was a kid.

~~

“Hey,” Jackson says to Mark the next time he walks in, determined to figure out how to configure a figure skating routine from the bitter ice and sharp blades. 

Tempted to just walk past without another word, Mark realizes he has to make a transaction before he can get on the ice. He settles with a half-smile that almost looks genuine, “Jackson, hi.”

“How’s it been? I know I only saw you,” Jackson flicks up his fingers from fists as if he’s actually counting the days between the last time Mark came and today, “Like, three days ago, but we hafta catch up someday.”

“Yeah, we really should,” Mark says almost convincingly, speaking in the same manner as speakers in English learning videos, so barely off, it’s almost uncanny.

“Alright, I won’t hold up any more of your time. I can see you’re itching to skate.”

~~

Small flairs are secondary to jumps and spins that demonstrate his mastery at the sport. Crystal clear jumps and landings, where anyone watching can count from the very instant his blades leave the ground to the very instant they hit the ice with nearly impossible accuracy. He wants to have spins where no one can count how many revolutions he’s spun. Putting his arms in different positions to give the appeal of added beauty doesn’t matter. 

Mark brandishes his new routine, which he’d prepared within the span of two days, to his coach, fighting for breath at the end, the noise at which his chest pumps up and down louder than the violin fading to obscurity.. 

“Mark, come here,” the tall coach says after a moment’s silence, “What was your thought process behind this?’

The hint of disappointment bouncing off of the inherent coldness of both the rink and the coach on Mark’s skin feels monumental, especially onto his thin layer of sweat and the hairs on his exposed skin. Mark frowns, but he doesn’t let his confusion show. “You said this was an important performance, so I wanted to try and incorporate as much as I could.”

“Come here,” the coach repeats again, motioning this time, as if Mark couldn’t understand the sharp European accent, motioning like he would to a scared animal, “Mark, come here.”

Mark takes that as a final warning and he practically runs off the ice and over to his coach. He loses his composure for maybe one, two, three seconds before he straightens out like he’s about to skate again, and he arches his back to stand up as tall as possible.

“This performance is not a bragging contest. You can’t jump or spin with no rhyme or reason. It has to be a performance, not a set of moves played to music,” Mark has the wherewithal to look somewhat ashamed as his coach berates him, “This is exactly why I’ve chosen this piece. You have to feel the music. You can’t just jump and spin and expect that to cut it.”

“Then what should I do?” Mark asks, his hand on his chin to simulate thinking, but his arms are crossed over his chest and he’s standing up ramrod straight.

“That’s for us to figure out.”

~~

The door that leads to the rink opens one day when Mark’s practicing. He’s been practicing for maybe three or four hours, trying to find that balance between beauty and technicality where the audience is left in awe at his talent at the sport and are left breathless by his impressive fluidity that mixes in the perfect touch of grandiosity to a generally hollow performance. Now, he half expects it to be his coach, who’s currently visiting family for the weekend, still ready to lambaste Mark’s inability to emote.

Instead, it’s Jackson. There aren't many other choices for who it could’ve been, but it still startles Mark to the smallest extent when he walks off to the side, fully expecting to peacefully grab his things and leave without a second’s delay. 

“Oh, Jackson,” Mark says as casually as he could manage, “What’s going on? What are you doing here?”

“Dude, can’t a friend visit a friend? I just wanted to see what you were doing,” Jackson says defensively, still smiling while he does so.

“Well,  _ did _ you see what I was doing?”

“You’re a man of many questions today, aren’t you,” it’s not funny in the slightest, but Jackson nevertheless lets out a hearty laugh, “Yeah, it seems really good.”

Mark’s heart flutters at the subtly offhanded compliment, and hides his face, “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Jackson raps his fingers atop the barely waist-high barrier before he speaks again before he snaps upright and says, “Say, are you free later today or anything? I’ve got the rest of the afternoon off.”

“Sure,” Mark says after a moment’s consideration, with a shrug, “What are you planning?”

A beat of silence before Jackson frowns, “Nothing really. What, do you have something in mind?”

Mark shakes his head, “Not really.”

~~

Jackson speaks. He speaks, and he speaks, and he speaks. In lieu of silence, there’s a warm voice and a bright smile. 

Somehow, Jackson doesn't seem to notice Mark’s lack of response, instead recalling tales of a gallant knight saving him from a fire when it was actually a security guard finding him in the bathroom in the midst of a fire drill. 

“So, that’s enough about me, what have you been doing?” Jackson asks, the remnants of a smile still plastered on his face. 

Mark thinks for a while, not sure how he should word his answer in any way other than a short, blunt  _ ‘ice skating, _ ’ so he says, “Not too much. I've just been busy with skating and all that… jazz.”

“Oh yeah, I saw you on T.V. a while ago,” Jackson says, undeterred by Mark’s lack of social aptitude.

“Really?” the last time Mark got the opportunity to watch himself skate, looking all shiny from various sequins and the layers of perspiration, his face red and appearing unnaturally out of breath, he looked away and refused to look back until the familiar thrums of the song faded away and all the screen shows is the judges’ deliberation and a newly empty ice rink. 

“Yeah, and I got the bragging rights to tell my roommates that I was pals with a famous figure skater way back in high school.”

Mark lets out a laugh, almost unable to control his body as he pumps his fist in a somewhat victorious fashion and says a wonderfully brilliant, “Hell yeah.”

~~

“You’ve got to  _ feel _ it,” the coach says, his tongue curling around the emphasized vowels of the word ‘ _ feel’ _ before the blunt consonant ends the word without the verbalization petering out.

“What difference does it make?” Mark asks, a flurry of snow flying up from where his skates meet the ice. 

“If I can tell you aren’t feeling the music, I can assure you that the judges will also be able to tell.”

“Okay,” he breathes out after a tepid silence where his skin is almost numb.

“Well, let’s get back to work, then,” the older male says, sending Mark back to action again, and pressing restart.

~~

There hasn’t been any form of particular feeling associated with axels and salchows and flips and loops and toe loops. Sending a blade through the air or the toepick into the ice doesn’t have anything more associated to it than the move changing names entirely on the different edges nd directions.

No one knocks him down a peg because he’s specifically emotionless. Not when he’s doing so many jumps and combinations that he’s almost flying through the air and around the rink. Scoring is based on correctness, not beauty. 

Someone could travel across the ice as if they were merely floating through a dreamy cloudscape where all their worries fade away, or like they’re frolicking in a technicolor meadow of flowers, and they’d still score lower than Mark purely because that’s how scoring works. Just because Mark’s performance looks unimaginably stiff and emotionless doesn’t mean he’s doomed to fail because his eyelids are slightly less hooded than his competitors. 

Beauty is entirely skin deep, but skating is purely technicality. So why should Mark change his style just to fit the ideals of beauty rather than the number of jumps and spins he can do.

~~

He bends his skating knee as he travels along an inside edge, and rests the entirety of his body weight on his left leg. He rotates around his left foot, and jumps.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

He lands, and he skates away from the crevice his toepick leaves in the ice.

Cold, lifeless, empty.


	2. Tepid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tepid. Lukewarm. Moderate. Room temperature.
> 
> Tepid. Apathetic. Desultory. Dull.

“You’ve got to go bigger,” the coach proclaims, more expressive than Mark’s ever heard him, revolving his arms in a large oval, only lengthening the oblong shape with the bend of his knees, “Make yourself visible to all the people in the crowd. Make them feel the performance”

And that's all the instruction Mark gets. 

He feels incredibly stupid when he goes out into the ice, swinging his arms around like a madman tripping on acid as he runs through his routine again. His knees drop so close to the ground each time his boot crosses over another, he almost doesn't make it to his cues. 

One—two—three—four becomes one  — two—three-four as he rushes. A thickly layered arpeggio is his first quad, and he barely makes it in time, his feet twisting in an attempt to project some semblance of emotion, barely landing a double. All he remembers is bigger. So he lands as if he's just managed to invent a quintuple jump.

Mark looks like a dumbass, and in an infinitesimal millisecond of calm in an otherwise chaotic attempt to redo his routine, he sees that his coach is just staring at him, in awe at how perversely wrong Mark is skating. 

“I said bigger, not idiotically,” the coach says as Mark huffs out, the oxygen concentration in the icy air too thin for him to satiate his longing lungs.

Mark has to compose himself and return to the area at which he starts, a hole where his toepick pierces into. 

He runs it again, feeling no less idiotic as his arms flail about, just barely holding their place through the wind of movement. He jumps properly this time, and lands with as minimal of a stumble if any. 

And again. Bigger arms, but no less for wear.

And again.

And again.

“Mark, come here,” there’s something ever so patronizing in the short motion of the finger and the embarrassingly parental tone the coach uses. Disappointment rings thick and loud into the air, especially now that the endless repetition of his program’s song has long died into nothing.

So he complies, and stands up as straight as he can manage, wobbling slightly on his exhausted legs and thin blades covered in snow. 

“You’re doing the same thing over and over again,” the older male points out, like Mark needs to understand what he already knows. But the man keeps speaking, keeps telling Mark how wrong he is, “It’s the definition of insanity—” the coach gesticulates wildly as if to show complete and utter exasperation, “—and if you don't change, you may not be able to get into the competition.”

And the man leaves, walking away as Mark shivers, exhausted and shell-shocked. In the wake of the closing door, which snaps shut in a resounding slam, Mark barely catches himself against the rink’s barrier.

~~

The supposed tantalizing beauty of skating is marred by Mark’s inability to emote properly. Being musically challenged doesn't help that face. The beats muffled by the hollow tin of the speakers brings a disparity between the flowing song and the intent to create a piece that’s barely audible through layers of distortion. 

He repeats the melody in his head, trying to reprogram his entire routine just by imagining what he can do. And he can’t. The reverberations of elegant swells over disgustingly harsh playback shoot through his brain until the instruments meld into a cacophony of white noise that he can’t tune out. His heartbeat tries to match the empty time signature floating through his head.

“I saw your coa—” Jackson's interrupted by the mere sight of Mark, “—what the hell happened?”

Mark can barely make out Jackson’s figure or his voice through the deafening thrum of his rapid heartbeat that fails to ever ebb to a bearable level. His head throbs to his heart, leaving in his ears waves that swallow him whole until he’s submerged into the darkness and into the waves.

“Okay — should I — no — oh god,” Mark can make out disjointed verbalizations from Jackson’s blurred mouth, “Shit.”

In a loss of gravity, Mark can feel his mind float up into the abyss, swimming through the emptiness for an escape. Nevertheless, he’s still tethered to solid land, unable to swim out and reach his destination. The white contrast that's a hardly visible star from his perspective. 

The rope gets cut by an icy knife that cuts through the womb of unconsciousness and brings Mark back into the overwhelming real world. 

“Oh, you’re awake!” Jackson exclaims, forehead wrinkled in abject concern, “Sorry, I needed to make sure you were still breathing.”

Mark blearily looks around, realizing the mixture of his sweat and ice had dripped down the back of his neck and onto the rest of the ice below him. He’s still a bit shell shocked, rubbing his eyes with the rough knit of damp gloves. He shakes his head before he can even face Jackson again. 

“No problem,” and Mark goes to stand up, nearly toppling over again, “What time is it?”

“Like, probably two, maybe two-fifteen. I don’t know, I didn’t check.”

“I gotta go, thanks for waking me up,” Mark moves along on trembling knees.

His body doesn't feel right, like he’s too far up from the ground, free-falling straight onto the cold ice, sharpened only by deep cuts made by sharper blades. Like he isn't corporeal despite feeling everything at full force. Like he’s looking through a pair of glasses, but the frames are tilted away from him. He sees with all the clarity of prescribed lenses, but the skewed view of curved lenses. 

Mark doesn't feel like himself, and the line between skater and himself grows foggier by the day. 

~~

“Hey, my roommates and I are going out to have lunch together. Wanna come with?” Jackson asks nonchalantly, his clothes grossly stylish for a seemingly casual get together. Mark thought colorful striped button-downs were a thing of the past, but whatever vintage mess Jackson’s wearing (the faded loose fit jeans with a tacky wallet chain doesn’t help his cause either, especially not with his shirt being buttoned just a few buttons too far from the collar, allowing strong pectorals to show even in the most unflattering of lighting) manages to prove Mark wrong.

When Mark’s eyes trail away from the clothes, he’s almost too distracted by Jackson’s bulging muscles appearing through the wide opening of the short sleeves and collar to remember that a question’s been asked, “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”

“My roommates and I are going out for lunch. Do you wanna come with?” 

Jackson doesn’t seem to care that Mark spent probably too long lying on the ground the other day, and neither of them have brought it up, but Mark still feels awkward, to the extent where he can hardly look into the other man’s eyes without remembering just how embarrassing it was. 

Even if he could get over that already tangible layer of awkwardness, he also knows that he’s terrible at meeting new people, to the point where the entire ‘ _ meeting new people’ _ thing is almost defamatory just thinking about it.

“Yeah, sorry. I’ve gotta practice.”

“C’mon!” Jackson responds almost too quickly, the pleasant tone overwhelmingly sweet against Mark’s hesitation, “It’s just a half hour or less. Trust me, I’ll get you back here as soon as you like.”

“Sorry, I have to skate.”

Jackson lets his smile drop for what seems like the first time since Mark’s met him again, and it leaves a cold poison in his veins, running up and down until he’s almost on the floor again, in the same vulnerable and terminating position as before.

Mark looks down in a moment’s hesitation, but he calls after Jackson, just as the slightly shorter male swings the door open, and stops by his side, “I mean, I’d love to have lunch with you guys, but I’m not very prepared for the occasion.”

Mark runs a shaking hand through his hair, ignoring the few stands that leave his scalp with his hand. He smiles, small, barely exposing his two front teeth, the corners of his lips quivering as if being pulled down by a large weight.

“Don’t worry, I’m not forcing you to come.” 

And Jackson leaves Mark in the dust.

~~

Mark’s not one to partake in recreational drug use of any kind, yet he stumbles into his apartment one day, his head a blurry jumble of nothingness. He isn't inebriated, nor is he under the influence, but he sure feels it. He’s never been so before, but the stone that's settled in his gut and the gnawing pain that fades into dizziness around the corners of his brain is enough to make him feel it. 

The walls are tall and barren, still the pristine white from when he first bought it. The shade of another taller building blocks any direct sunlight from shining in through the balcony window, bathing the entire apartment in a bleak darkness. And under that light, the poorly painted over filler is a harsh white compared to the aging grey-ish white underneath. 

The kitchen is virtually untouched, dust painting the countertops in a dirty grey while the living room has a singular couch and T.V., both of which have the same lack of luster every surface in his kitchen has. The single bedroom in the entire house is the only one that seems inhabited, yet remains colorless. 

Mark doesn't feel at home when he falls into his couch, a puff of dust flying through the fabric and into the air, illuminated from the uncovered lamp in the corner of the room and sparse moonlight. He doesn't feel at home when he presses his fingers against his temple and massages the headache to at least feed the pain to quell it. He doesn't feel at home when he closes his eyes and sits there, for perhaps forever if he can keep it up for long enough. 

He treads the treacherous balance between shutting his brain and falling asleep and remembering what had happened with him and Jackson. And instead of falling into either side, vertigo strikes him from beneath his closed eyes and he can't find comfort in either idea.

Not ready to collect dust with the couch, Mark ignores the dull ache burning a line of fiery hot pain through his body, especially towards his arms and legs or the intensified pounding of his head or the bitter nauseous feeling poking through his stomach, in favor of dragging himself to the kitchen. 

The stark lights cast a dark shadow over his face, his eye bags a deep purple, nearly black color, visible in the hazy reflection on the metal refrigerator. Mark’s exhausted. 

As he opens the door, flinching from the alarmingly bright light, and goes to grab water, Mark contemplates quitting skating. It’s not like he hates skating, but when the hobby became a chore and when the chore became a job, Mark couldn’t remember what drew him to the sport when he was a child. He couldn’t remember ever wanting to skate.

And as time flows further and further away from his first show, Mark can’t remember how much fun he was having. He can’t remember the routine. He can’t remember the crowd. He can’t remember his coach at the time. He can’t remember his emotions at the time. He can’t remember if his parents ran up to him with flowers like so many other kids got. He can’t remember it.

Water slides past the thick layer of phlegm covering his throat, dripping down into his stomach in uneven drops, like Chinese water torture on his organs, and Mark‘s stomach lurches. 

Impressively, though, Mark walks briskly to his bathroom and manages to lock the door behind him.

He’s exhausted. 

~~

Mark doesn’t recall falling asleep on the ground, just a few feet off from his rug, and in front of the toilet. He has an immensely painful crick in his neck and a resounding throb of sore muscles makes the tile ground feel unreal, like he’s floating through the ocean, unable to stand.

Whether or not he wants to, Mark still has to go skating, so he goes up to go to the rink. And he has to trudge his day through practice without submitting to the vertigo he’s endured for the previous day or the exhaustion-based interactions he’s had with any of the whole two people he’d spoken to the entire week. 

He just wants to go to sleep.

~~

Mark was barely old enough to stand up when he started skating. He was ten when he won his first competition. And he was ten when his life quickly changed focus from his schooling to solely figure skating. 

At ten, Mark didn’t have a family. He didn’t have a home. He didn’t have anything. And at ten, skating was his family. The rink was his home. And his only motivation was the thunderous applause he’d get as a gifted skater and the small glimmer of something bigger. Fame.

The idea of layers of lenses transcribing his visage onto millions of screens was enough of a sensation of connection that, even if Mark never cared about fame, he still felt like he belonged. Even if it’s pockmarked with a certain loneliness a face-to-face connection can cure.

Mark wasn’t a celebrity. He still isn’t, but when he sees the lenses he’s never minded before, and he remembers the state of himself, and he finds himself craving that barely there connection with an added layer of depth on the lenses, where the receiving side of his skating can see all of the dreadfully dull person Mark sees in himself.

The sensation of being loved is so strangely foreign that whatever superficial adoration his ‘ _ fans _ ’ call him is enough to quell his longing. And he knows why.

Mark’s in his twenties and he hasn’t spoken to his parents since he was sixteen and he left the house. He’s in his twenties and he can’t even remember any of his friends from school, with the obvious outlier being Jackson. 

And Jackson, oh how Mark dreads walking into the building through the murky yet transparent glass doors, and taking the walk of shame up to the counter. 

But when he arrives at the rink, Mark’s heart can slow to a comfortable heartrate when he sees that the one person he’s dreaded seeing isn’t present. No one’s behind the counter, though, and yet the doors are unlocked. 

Suspiciously prodding his way through the sliding doors and beneath the heated fans that whir every time someone enters the building, Mark looks around, as if searching through the long abandoned, dilapidated ruins of a towering structure that once held all the power in the world. His bag is slung carefully over his shoulder, pulling the section where the strap meets his sweatshirt down as he treads the ground like there are active, beeping mines ready to detonate if his movements are too rash. 

Aside from the near constant buzz from every machine struggling for life and the aggressive overhead fans ventilating such a large, open area, the entire building is seemingly silent. Until it’s not, that is. 

Distant footsteps spring Mark to life, forcing him to straighten from the cautious trepidation to a carefully maintained poise that makes him seem robotic. 

“Oh, Mark. Sorry, I was using the restroom,” and there Jackson is, in all his uniformed glory, sheepishly shaking somewhat damp hands onto the floor. And for a second, Mark’s star struck. Not because something spectacular is unfolding, but because Mark’s struggling to balance the thrumming anxiety with his confused excitement into an upright poise. Jackson opens his mouth and lets out a short monotone hum before addressing Mark, “Well, come on, you’re here to skate, right?”

Mark lets out a shaky “yeah,” and walks like the divots on the ground are craters impeding his ability to move. 

There’s something sickeningly abnormal to this stiff normalcy that hangs from the ceiling like large icicles hanging on by a thread, threatening to fall either onto Mark or into pieces of the broken illusion.

It falls.

“Hey, look, actually, can we talk for a bit?” Jackson interrupts, “I’ll let you skate for a longer time than you bought if I’m really bothering you.”

The shattered bits of ice lay by their feet, and begin to stain the dark grey black. 

“Yeah, what do you need?” Mark decides, setting his bag by one of the chairs that have been meticulously laid out.

“Sorry, for yesterday, there were a lot of people here two days ago and I guess I still had some residual rage,” Jackson laughs, leaning slightly over the counter, “Doesn’t mean I should’ve gotten angry, though.”

Is Mark upset? No, he may have been terrified of coming back here, but he wasn’t angry. He wasn’t going to explode. He didn’t go home crying, “It wasn’t your fault.”

Jackson shakes his head, smiling as he says, “Thanks. If you want, you can come with us next time we get together.”

Now, Mark has a sneaking suspicion that Jackson had forgotten what the basis of the argument had been and only remembered the part where Jackson left and Mark said he wanted to go. The slightly less than twenty-four hour time span isn’t expansive enough so Jackson could completely forget, but Mark gives the man the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he  _ did  _ forget about it. So what, things move on. 

Still, Mark appreciates the sentiment, even if he doesn’t reflect Jackson’s eagerness or excitement, “Sure, I’d love that.”

Jackson’s smile gets impossibly big, expanding across a slightly tanned countenance with a sheen of ended trepidation and slight shock, “Well, I won’t take up any more of your time today. I’ll text you later, if you want.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

And now Mark has plans.

~~

Mark doesn't regret it when he leaves the rink with Jackson.

He doesn't regret it when he buckles into the Hyundai  _ Accent _ .

He doesn't even regret it when he tosses his ice skating bag in the trunk without a care for its contents.

And despite that, Mark is wracked with regret when he enters the dim restaurant and sits down into the peeling faux leather seat, listening to indistinct chattering and the scraping of silverware on ceramic plates. He regrets it when he’s introduced to the other men by name and he feels so out of his depth. 

“Hot damn, where’d you pick this dude up off the floor from?” one jokes, laughing to himself before the others join along. Mark's doesn't automatically assume it's at his expense, but the unrelenting stare they give him once laughter ceases is the most unnerving of all that’s been thrown at him. The original jokester, whose name Mark has already forgotten, begins again, “Jeez, did you find your clothes in a dumpster?”

Okay, so the joke wasn't at the expense of Mark, but at his fashion choice? He’s not hurt, he’s dressed in the best looking sweatshirt and sweatpant combination he could find in his closet, both of which are several years old and falling apart at their seams. But he doesn’t know how to respond, so he gives them a slightly miffed smile.

“Alright, this is getting too ridiculous. Stop doing this,” Jackson says, whining more than berating. 

“Chill,” the young man says, placating Jackson in the most effortless manner ever before turning back to Mark, “You know we're just messin’ with you, right?”

There are five of them here—Mark included—and he’s terrified of three of them. 

All Mark knows is skating. He could spin and jump in rapid succession with perfect execution, but he wouldn't know how to have idle conversations with more than one person, never mind someone he doesn't know. And even now, roughly seven-and-a-half miles away from the ice rink, Mark’s running the routine in his head because it’s all he can think about. Not because he can correct and perfect it in his mind, but because it’s enough of a distraction to keep him grounded. 

In the corner of his mind, buried under scrapped ideas like quad-quad combinations that are nearly impossible to execute even once let alone hundreds of times or grandeur strokes of a faux elegance that makes Mark feel more like a dying fish than anything else, there’s the distinctly sharp voice accented with harsh r’s and thin vowels ready to cut through Mark from the inside out. It’s a wordless call despite the obvious sound of another human’s voice. 

His coach’s voice grows to an echo, and then into a surround sound experience where it’s everything he hears. The clatter of plates on plates with the visual cue being the waiter balancing an inordinate amount of plates on a singular tray. The chatter of a boisterous conversation right in front of him. The hand dryer from the restrooms right next to them. None of them can be as powerful as his coach's disappointed and stern yells, telling him to do better. 

“Excuse me for a sec, I need to go use the restroom real quick,” Mark says, his voice deceptively casual as he stands up, nearly toppling straight back down.

“We were just about to order,” Jackson opposed, frowning. 

“Just order me whatever, I really gotta go.”

The sound of disappointment. Even in nearly complete silence, especially in stark contrast to the noisy exterior outside the room, and the lingering drips of faucets that haven't been properly shut off, can't beat out the oppressive yet nonexistent voice.

It echoes off the barren walls, painted a deep shade of yellow to give the illusion of warmth in a terribly cold room. It bounces around the room and in the hollow orifices of the toilets and sinks that coat the voice in a ceramic iciness. 

And that sensation of cold melding with the warmth of Jackson’s loud voice that’s still barely audible through the crack in the doorway leaves Mark in a cold sweat. 

“Hey, sorry it took so long,” Mark says, sliding into his seat without an explanation for his prolonged absence.

“Jeez, how big of a shit did you take?” one of the boys asks, speaking too loudly and aggressively for where they are. 

“Oh my god, shut up,” the boy closest to Mark says, rubbing a hand down his face in embarrassment.

“We didn't know what to get you, so I hope alfredo's good with you.”

Mark doesn’t indulge himself in the hedonism of desirably creamy foods such as the meal that’s moments from arriving at the table. The mere thought of long lines of dough coated in a thick sauce of cheese sliding down his throat where nothing of its kind has traversed before makes him feel sick.

He’s not accustomed to foods like this.

And he sits there, floundering between thanking the other men or vomiting on the table. Mark’s hedonistic tendencies are moments from spilling from his carefully constructed veneer.

~~

Jackson is pleasantly ignorant, either that or less daft than he appears and doesn't mention Mark’s discomfort as it would only cause more. Whichever way it is, Mark doesn’t mind. It serves him the benefit of not having to deal with further confrontation. The Hong Konger is still happily chatting it up with his roommates as if the pallor of Mark’s face hasn’t faded to a wan, nearly white shade of puce. And to that, Mark’s thankful for the dim nighttime level of lighting despite it being midday. 

Nobody seems to notice Mark beyond Jackson’s futile attempts to give Mark some of the attention he so desperately despises. A quick  _ ‘Oh, how ‘bout you, Mark?’ _ and watch as said male unfolds into the antisocial butterfly that he is. And as Mark flounders to answer, Jackson’s quick to defer away from him despite repeating it several times, seemingly forgetting Mark’s issues. 

It’s not like he can blame Jackson for just wanting to include him in conversations he’d rather not take part in. He just smiles, divulges whatever information that’s tangentially related to the topic, and listens as the conversation shifts focus. 

No matter how embarrassingly awkward it gets, Mark and Jackson leave just as they’re finishing shoveling what’s left of their food into their mouths without a mention of the strange yet barely noticeable shift in atmosphere as soon as Mark returns from the restroom. 

“Sorry, did we make you uncomfortable?” Jackson asks a few minutes into the trip back. 

And Mark, being the upstanding citizen that he is, feels no need to lie, “No, it was just a me thing. Haven’t been out like that for a while, I guess I forgot how it feels to talk to so many people and be somewhere so… busy.”

Jackson doesn’t answer for a short while, and for a second, Mark’s scared his admission has exposed too much of himself and that Jackson’s disappointed by this side of him that he’s tried so hard to hide, but he doesn’t get the chance to rescind his statement when Jackson speaks over Mark’s thoughts in a strangely meek yet perfectly earnest response, “If you don’t mind me asking, how long has it been?”

Truth is, Mark doesn’t know. He doesn’t actively count his lack of social interaction, quite frankly because he’d rather not see how long it’s truly been since he’d last hung out casually with so many people. He doesn’t want to come up with a definitive answer as he doesn’t even know it, and he also doesn’t want to expose himself too deeply now, “I don’t know, it’s just been a while.”

“I didn’t mean it like you  _ have  _ to answer, I was just curious. I shouldn’t have forced you to do something you’re uncomfortable with.”

“Nah, I said I wanted to come, so don’t worry about me.”

“You’re my friend, Mark.” 

There’s no smooth transition to the accompanying silence, but the lack of direct reassurance for Mark’s worries is enough to make Mark erupt into a vague warmth that Mark hasn’t felt in years. 

Even when Mark’s skating on the cold ice, making the air around him steam up in his own layer of sweat, the residual cold still penetrates deep into his being and leaves him frozen in himself. But there’s something about Jackson that manages to melt that ice without Mark even noticing the returning feeling in his extremities. 

It almost feels normal.

~~

“What’s going on?” the accented voice of Mark’s coach asks, surprisingly relaxed as he leans against the barrier, beckoning Mark over with a simple  _ come here _ signal.

“What do you mean?” Mark asks, knowing where this leads.

“You’re looser than normal—,” Mark goes to apologize, but the coach interrupts Mark’s interruption, “—It’s not a bad thing. You finally don’t look like doing  _ this _ or doing  _ that _ is a chore. What happened?”

Mark frowns, but he keeps his back neutral and fights the urge to shrug and go back to skating, and answers, “Nothing happened?”

“I swear, it’s not a bad thing. I just want to know what caused this change.”

“I don’t know, I guess I feel more relaxed,” Mark pauses, his forehead wrinkled in thought, “Maybe it was letting off some steam? I don’t know.”

“That’s fine,” the coach beckons Mark to come closer again, and when Mark finally approaches, he says, “Now it’s time to work on the cohesion.”

So Mark’s disjointed series of jumps and spins doesn’t work with this sudden shift. When he becomes more fluid, nothing just melds together into a perfect color, there are still splotches of darkness and inconsistency that requires more mixing. 

Now how’s he supposed to fix that?

~~

Something tells Mark that seeing Jackson inside the rink more often signifies some shift, but in all honesty, it may be his sudden increase in hours. It’s not like Jackson works every day at every time Mark skates, but more and more, he sees Jackson leaning over the same boards where his coach noted detailed observations of Mark at a single glance. And seeing that is enough to make Mark on edge.

The mere idea that Jackson could analyze and criticize all of Mark’s actions is truly terrifying. No less is that there are almost never other people skating in this rink. Most of the other skaters are diverted to the other rink this establishment houses, although other  _ this-is-my-job _ skaters that have that air of self-entitlement still show up from time to time, interrupting Mark’s skating with whatever routine they’re doing. 

“Mark,” Jackson says from the barrier, right where Mark’s coach stood mere days ago, beckoning him in the same vaguely condescending action, “I know this is sudden, but the rink’s being rented out.”

Of all of Mark’s ten or so years skating at the same rink every couple of days, which only recently turned to daily, Mark has never heard of a single person renting out the rink. Mainly because there’s not much appeal to an externally dilapidated ice rink where its main patron is an antisocial but almost famous skater that looks like he’s out for blood and a couple other pampered kids who don’t want contact with other people, sacrificing coming to this rink just for a sense of privacy. 

In all honesty, he sympathizes with the kids that come with a predetermined fear of falling and being seen falling. But tens of kids skating around like they’re running on knives while sliding around the cold snow-like layer scraped off by their tiny blades is the opposite. Mark doesn’t even want to think of them. 

“Now?” Mark has to ask, eyeing the glass doors as if giant flesh-eating monsters are about to break through the windows and eat Mark from the inside out. 

“No, in about half an hour, but I’d prepare to get off if I were you,” Jackson smiles, leaning further forward, cheekily adding a, “Plus, we could hang out while they come in.”

Mark has no problem hanging out with Jackson one-on-one, and especially after the disaster that was their lunch meetup, he wants to avoid being with more than one person for the time being, “Sure, why not?”

So that’s how Jackson manages to pull Mark off the ice probably twenty minutes before he needs to. Mark doesn’t mind, he’s been fearing executing the routine his brain’s attempted to build and realizing belatedly that he’s way out of his depths. 

He follows Jackson out, slipping behind the counter to take off his skates as the zamboni whirs in the distance through the door that’s slowly sliding shut. 

“So, how are you?” Jackson asks tenderly, like a teacher attending to a sobbing child, standing a fair distance away from Mark. There’s a moment of hesitation where the flecks of brown swirling around the nearly black irises halt for a split second before Jackson blinks it away and gives more context for his question, “Like, we haven’t talked in a while, and I still feel bad about what happened at lunch.”

It’s probably been a few days, maybe a week or two since Mark went out to lunch with Jackson and his friends, and Mark all but forgot about it completely. And now that it’s back in his head, his toes curl in pure distaste at the memory. Mark forces a smile, turns his attention to the doors and back, and finally answers, “I’m good—great, even. I’ve had time to recuperate from that, so now I’m feeling great.”

“Really?” Jackson asks rhetorically, with no weight of sarcasm or concern holding it down, “That’s great! I swear, though. Next time we go out to eat, I’ll make sure we order something good.”

Mark doesn’t flush. Not because he’s embarrassed or by the mere mention of “go” and “out” in conjunction with each other, but because he’s flattered Jackson cares so much and his heart rate definitely accelerated, but he doesn’t let it show. He tries not to make his face too flat when he responds, “I can’t wait.”

“Yeah, you should be terrified at how well we can get into your mind,” Jackson weakly threatens, looking deep at Mark’s face as he laughs at his own joke.

The only issue is that Mark doesn’t mind Jackson’s roommates because they’re just trying to have good fun with what they got and if they want to continuously repeat the same awful joke because it’s amusing, then Mark doesn’t care. He’s not personally offended by what they say. And who is he to ruin such innocent fun? 

But despite how much he tries to tell himself that he doesn’t care, there’s that inkling of crippling self-consciousness that penetrates his attempted emotionless stability whenever Jackson’s concerned, almost bulging pleading eyes asking the same question:  _ is he okay? _ and each time, Mark has to let that sensation of weakness push back just to process the question. 

Still, despite the almost negligible amount of self-consciousness biting at his very flesh, Mark tries to smile and lets out a breath to simulate laughter as best as he can and says, “I can’t wait,” even though he couldn’t dread anything more.

~~

The strange sensation of emptiness digs a deep pit into Mark’s stomach and leaves him gasping for air when he sits at the foot of his abject terror and he has to grasp at the cold just to try and feel the lucidity he wants to believe he’s once felt. The music fades to obscurity as his heartbeat struggles to claw out through his ears, rapidly and desperately, a great disparity from the immaculate ethereal grace of the sparsely instrumented song to the increasingly unstable pump of blood through a nervous heart. 

Bile burns its way around his throat, leaving a sour taste just out of his reach, but big enough for him to feel beneath the perspiration running down his skin in rivers at a time. And it’s running thick enough for the winds keeping the rink cold to comb through his sparse arm hairs to send goosebumps all through his overheated body. 

His vision fades in and out, and the pale expanse of the scratched ice are enough to nearly blind him and leave him disoriented. The static settling around his brain in a comfortable blanket where he almost doesn’t want to escape from the fading blur away from the clearness he needs to fight to reach. 

The ice quakes against his skin, and whether it’s because of his own shivering or because the ice is actually shaking under some imminent disaster or because he’s being shaken, he just wants to settle into a crater he creates with his overheating body. 

The biting cold of the ice surface and the cold air emanating off of it evens out with his feverish body temperature to a tepid nothingness of infinitely numb sensations. 

The cold sweat cuts into the ice and he falls in.

~~

All Mark knows is the cold sterility of white. The ice. The discarded skates. The empty white walls of his room. The blinding overhead lights as he falls onto the ground. 

And when he wakes up to the familiar cold walls and stoic emptiness and the stable beeping next to his head, it’s all he remembers. Even though he’s not alone—his coach is at his bedside, the European grizzled impassivity fading to genuine concern if not for a second when Mark comes to—and the colors of the bed he wakes up in and the detailed furniture are notably distinct from the pale walls, all he feels and smells and hears and tastes is white. 

Cold, sterile, empty. Directly smothering whatever flame of whatever unfamiliar beauty remains and leaving in its wake a pile of grey, nearly black, ash. 

But Mark isn’t stuck in this bright white purgatory alone, his coach is by his side, breaking him from the tunnel-visioned daze and pulling him away from the still smoldering ash, “You’re up!” 

An I.V. drip keeps Mark chained to the bed so when he goes to stand up and proclaim his perfect health, he nearly falls back into the dark blue pillow. 

“Don’t get up,” in an instant, the emotional concern melts into the same hardness Mark’s become accustomed to, “What’s wrong? What happened?”

What happened? Mark doesn’t know. He goes to open his mouth, stalling for time as he hitches in a deep breath for some wild coincidence to break down the door and allow him time to either think of the answer to an unanswerable question or avoid answering at all cost. And no matter how much he stalls, breathing in and out like it’s a chore, Mark finally begins, “I don’t know. I was skating, and now I’m here.”

“Mark, tell me what happened,” the low growl is enough to send the heart monitor spiking up, though it’s hardly noticeable by audio alone.

“I already said I don’t know,” Mark says, exasperated. 

“People don’t faint just like that,” the coach punctuates with a sharp snap, the room becoming infinitely colder despite the lack of shift on the thermostat. Finally noticing the minute shift in heart rate, the coach sighs and shifts the chair closer to Mark’s face, “I get it, you’re under a lot of pressure. But that cannot mean you can neglect your health like you are right now.”

“What do you mean?” he asks, dreading the answer he already knows.

“You’re extremely dehydrated and malnourished, Mark.”

~~

When Mark had his skates forced onto him as a child, he didn’t know where the beginning of this hobby would take him. And when he finally realized that he was on the ice alone, spots in the audience sparse enough for him to notice the distinct absence of his parents, he found himself drowning in the hedonism of his own self-indulgence. 

The sinful secret he’s kept concealed beneath the glitz and glamor of sequins all around his colorful costumes that, when viewed from the wrong angle, could show the cracks in his foundation. Bad habits become his motivation, and his only payoff is accepting his victory through his self-induced struggle and the control in absolute chaos.

Costumes take longer to fit, and his makeup is caked on by the pound. His hair leaks through the crevices between his fingers as he nurses migraines day in and day out. It’s nothing anyone can notice when he skates faster than the eye can see, jumping and spinning so aggressively, it’s a shock he doesn’t snap in half. 

So when Mark’s immaculate perfection sought by his control of life reveals itself to the judging public, he feels everything he’s built up on a shaky foundation come tumbling down as his coach looks at him, judgmentally. 

His coach mumbles something through the static fog and leaves Mark in petrifying silence. 

And the door slamming open to reveal Jackson is the only solace, pulling Mark from the icy cold and into a lukewarm numbness.


	3. Warm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warm. Mild. Temperate. Pleasant  
> Warm. Lively. Loving. Happy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (U.S.)  
> National Eating Disorder Association: (800) 931-2237  
> National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders: (630) 577-1330  
> National Alliance on Mental Illness: (800) 950-NAMI (6264)
> 
> (Australia)  
> Butterfly Foundation for Eating Disorders: 1800 33 4673  
> Eating Disorder Association: 07 3077 7320
> 
> (Canada)  
> N.E.D.I.C.: 1-866-633-4220  
> (toronto) 416-340-4156
> 
> (U.K.)  
> B-eat: 0808 801 0677 (adults) 0808 801 0711 (youths)  
> Anorexia and Bulimia Care: 03000 11 12 13

“How long have you been starving yourself?” the coach asks, the twinge of sympathy bordering on apathy evident in the low, typically emotionless voice, is strangely welcoming, especially after Jackson’s tornado of worry rushes out the door as fast as it entered. There’s no uncertainty about it. Mark’s biggest secrets have spilled out into the open, and he has to watch it splash around with nothing to ladle it back where it had been cached for so long. 

He’s exposed, open and vulnerable. The strong skater Mark’s built up through years of loneliness and insecurity is no more than a pile of glass at his feet. And now that it’s gone, he’s no longer the one asian figure skater who performed immaculate routines without even breaking a sweat, he’s Mark Tuan. And nothing more than that. A husk of his former persona with too much anxiety to ever be stored again.

And because of that, Mark doesn’t know when the shift in mentality occured. When he decided health wasn’t important. When he decided he needed control. When he decided he wasn’t worth it.

When Mark doesn’t even try to open his mouth and the sight of droplets funneling carefully but imprecisely into the tube feels too much like water torture, and the somehow steady beeping of the monitor is earsplitting, the coach finally speaks again, more desperately this time, “Tell me, please.”

The gaussian blur inside his mind consumes the entirety of his thoughts, his memories, and all the people he loves. Mark can’t see through the blur, the colors merging into a technicolor nothingness. 

Then the blur is sliced in half, allowing the layer clouding his vision to shift over, and the sword is his coach, “I’m pulling you from the competition until you recover.”

Mark’s eyes shoot open, his body erecting upright, and he stares in fear. Ice skating is all he has, and if the implicit _he can’t skate again if he doesn’t recover_ rings true, he’d have nothing. He pries his lips open as if it were a chore, and from betwixt his chapped lips, he takes in a breath of air like it’s enough to satiate his desperate lungs, and speaks in a panic, “No, no, no, no! You can’t do that!”

Mark’s loud but hoarse voice creates a stark dichotomy with his coach’s calm growl as the older male sighs, the impossible calm raising in volume if not by a bit, “I can. And if you keep acting this way, I’d have to.”

“I’m fine,” Mark shifts around the bedsheets and tries standing, his dark hair falling into his face and into his eyes, his free arm too busy gesticulating to move it away from his eyes, “Please, this is all I have! I can skate!”

“Mark, if you were fine, you wouldn’t be here.”

In a stunned silence, the monitor’s increasingly unsteady beeping grows faster and faster, filling the air with a white noise that seems to occupy every corner in Mark’s brain. It bounces around the sides and creates a sense of vertigo so strong, Mark falls back into the bed. 

“Go back to sleep. We can talk about this later.”

Later can’t arrive soon enough.

~~

Time passes so slowly that, on days where he’s supposed to be skating, he loiters around the rink, and just talks to Jackson. The other male’s already been informed not to let Mark in, no matter how hard he begs, so trying to sneak in is a lost cause. 

But listening to Jackson’s low voice ramble on and on about anything that comes into his mind and young skaters skate around like ice skating is exhilarating is solace enough for the skate shaped hole in his heart. 

“So this kid runs up to the counter, right? Y’know, you’d expect him to just stand there and ask for a pair of skates, but he jumps on the counter, and I have to catch him before he falls onto the ground because he’s just goin’ so fast. And he asks about you,” Jackson looks over to him, and Mark feels himself flush, partially out of embarrassment from revealing himself in such an untimely manner days prior, and also because he has to accept that maybe he just really likes the dude. 

“Really?” Mark asks, leaning back in the swivel chair that’s just behind the counter despite there hardly being more than two people there. In the days here Mark’s just had so little to do, he’s already begun to develop habits he never in a million years could’ve done before. Without ice skating to occupy his time, he’s had far too much time to just sit around and relax. 

Relaxation, to some extent, is terrifying. Like Mark’s running sprints on a treadmill without an emergency stopper, and stopping to relax and take a breath would be suicidal. And if he manages to step off, he wouldn’t be able to get back on. 

“Yeah,” Jackson says, leaning with his back against the counter as they hear a door open, waving calmly to a young mother that’s swiftly running to the bathroom, and relishing in the excited yelling of children developing a passion or hobby. He smiles, continuing cheekily, “He was asking all this junk about what you like and how you act. I think, because he likes you,” 

“Oh shut up,” Mark says, shaking his head and smiling jokingly, and though it’s lightyears away from Jackson’s own, he’s trying. Making sure not to expose the tips of yellowed canines, damaged from years of abuse, Mark lets out a short laugh, “He’s too young for me anyway.”

“I’m glad to see you’re having fun,” a new voice enters, the same dark accent coloring the sky in a haze of shade. 

Mark stops talking, maybe out of an acute awareness of feeling so exposed beneath the humming fans and choir of jovial children’s voices he’s never been able to hear from inside the rink. He squeezes his lips together in a smile, which is forced if anything, and looks away, in any direction apart from at the man. 

“Come on, let’s have a chat.”

Mark looks at Jackson, who’s already walking to the door leading out from behind the counter, and whispers, “Good luck,” jokingly, despite the concern radiating from his voice.

Sparing one last glance at Jackson, like he’s being forcibly conscripted into the military and he’s never going to see the slightly younger male again, he follows his coach out the sliding doors and into the older male’s car. 

“Sorry I took you away from your friend,” the apology is half-hearted at best and mocking at worst, “But it’s been a while since we talked. How are you feeling?”

The floaty feeling he’s had for the past ten years is now an anchor tied around his body, pulling him towards the ground. Every part of Mark that’s taken ten years to build up has been relinquished to recovery. All the control, the strength Mark knew is accumulating dust, laying forgotten where he can no longer find it. And it makes him feel sick.

Recovery was supposed to feel good. Like he’s triumphant over a towering enemy after a long fought battle. But right now, it doesn’t feel like he’s recovering. He feels strange, so unlike himself that he wants to scream until he has nothing left to feel. Until he’s just as empty as when he started.

“I’m good, I’m… getting better.”

“Mark, I’m asking how you’re feeling. Not about how your recovery’s going,” the coach says tenderly, his voice a low rasp as they slow to a stop at the red light. The coach looks over to Mark, pale eyes meeting dark and freezing Mark in an instant.

“I’m feeling fine,” Mark brings himself to answer, hardly believing it himself as he hangs off the tight balance of his skating career and his terrified innards where he’s half tempted to let go and expose his shivering form and finally relax from his ramrod cautiousness, and he’s just as tempted to keep holding on, not ready to lose that part of himself too. 

“Be honest with me, are you really?” the coach casts a doubtful look over to Mark, his piercing eyes even colder than how Mark feels. And under the sharp gaze, Mark has to nod, averting his eyes as he does so just to avoid spilling out his issues on his unsuspecting coach. But the coach doesn’t buy into that, “Mark, we’ve known each other for, how long, ten, fifteen years? You have to trust me.”

Mark hesitates, his newfound relaxedness around Jackson almost nonexistent when put under duress in such a casual setting. He cringes when his voice breaks as he says, “I trust you.”

“You don’t,” the light turns green, and the startling blue eyes disappear if not for the vague glances the man throws at Mark, “I can see it for myself. You need to trust that I’m here to help you.”

Although hesitant, Mark admits, “I know, I know. I trust you, okay?”

“It’s okay. I don’t want to see you in any more trouble than you already are.”

There’s something wistful in the other man’s voice, something that indicates something more than a friendly, almost familial relationship. Mark doesn’t question it, although he makes a mental note of it before he looks away, and sighs. He feels the waist of his pants press against his stomach, and sucks in, if not for a second of feeling himself, and releases, “I’m trying. It’s just really hard.”

“I know,” the coach says in a strange, indistinguishable tone, the words too vague to convey anything while simultaneously saying too much, his blue eyes finding Mark’s for a split second before diverting back to the road.

~~

Just because Mark’s no longer allowed on the ice doesn’t mean it can stop him from thinking of his routine. He doesn’t know for sure if his coach actually pulled from merely auditioning, but he needs something to distract him from the bitter nothingness that befalls his schedule-less days. 

Rather than act out the motions in his deathly silent apartment, he dreams up the entire routine as if he were drifting through his winding halls, sliding in and out of rooms as the sun shines off the rustic wooden floors, like everything’s perfectly under his control. 

The control. The restraint. Mark imagines himself skating along the length of his house, small and feeble, terribly lonely as he folds in on himself beneath the awful silence. 

The new. The freedom. Expression in his finest form as he tries to imagine Jackson was standing there in his living room, dancing expressively to vibrant music without knowing he was right around the corner. 

But it’s so far away from his reach that he can’t seem to break out of the box he’s constructed around himself. He tries to imagine that carelessness, the excitement to be himself when he can’t imagine reaching that sense of freedom.

Mark feels sick, so dizzy, he doesn’t feel like he’s getting any better. Through his tangibly uncomfortable, muggy vertigo, he claws his person for his phone without even considering his clothes or the numbness that’s run down the adrenaline beneath his skin. 

“ _Hello? Mark?_ ”

The low tones of the other’s voice cuts through the vertigo around his head like a knife, and Mark yearns for more. The draw of his own blood against the familiar pointedness of a calm yet raspy voice is a tantalizing thought where Mark doesn’t want it to stop. He reaches up to his head just to feel if he’s still alive.

“ _Mark? Are you there?_ ” 

The knife saws back and forth, the shining blade a gleam through Mark’s exhausted vision. Viscous as his blood flows down Mark’s forehead and between his eyes, the vertigo intensifies with a terribly tangible pain. Like he’s actually being cut in two. 

“ _Hey, are you there?”_

Further down as it appears to halt its smooth slicing. As if in suspended animation, the knife reaches a stopping point and can’t seem to get through. In the terrible silence, he has to reach through the fog just to breathe.

“ _Mark!_ ”

The last strings of the foggy dizziness snap apart instantly from beneath the knife, and Mark’s finally lucid.

“Yeah, sorry,” shakily, Mark manages to get his voice out, “I’m—I’m here.”

“ _Hey, what’s up?_ ” Jackson doesn’t sound too annoyed when Mark prods at the remains of his dizziness, rubbing at his eyes as it fades away. 

“Sorry, it’s nothing, really. I-I guess I just wanted to hear you talk?”

“ _Sure_ ,” there’s a ruckus on the other end, where children and their parents pour out the sets of double doors. 

“I could call back later if you’re busy.”

There’s a significant amount of shuffling where Mark actually has to pull the phone away from his ear when it grows, “ _Here, hold on_ ,” there’s more shuffling before Jackson’s voice returns, if not a bit muffled, “ _So, I’ve got this incredible story from last week._ ”

~~

Mark’s coach drops by one day—really, it’s closer to the night than it is the day, but Mark’s willing to ignore the glaring three a.m. in bold red on the clock just outside his view because he wasn’t really asleep anyway—with nothing more than a simple _‘omw’_ as if the few minutes between the text and the coach’s eventual arrival would suffice as a warning. 

“Hello, sorry for showing up unannounced,” now it’s not like Mark’s particularly angry, but he remembers belatedly at the state of his house. Nevertheless, the coach pushes past Mark and sits down on the somewhat damp couch from when Mark decided to finally scrape the dust off in an insomnia-driven early spring cleaning, and looks so strangely disheveled that Mark’s concerned. Faltering slightly, Mark sits tentatively next to the man and waits as the coach opens his mouth to speak, “How are you?”

Mark has the acumen to know telling the truth would save him from an earful of annoyed rambling about how he needed to trust the man, but not the competence to actually go through with it. He leans back as if he’s comfortable in this bizarre situation and lies, “I’m good. Uh, great, even.”

“You don’t have to lie for me,” the words come out thick and muddled, not helped by his accent that curls the words into a slur. Mark can barely understand it before the man continues, “Sorry I showed up unannounced, and looking like this too.”

Mark has seldom seen the coach not armed with a stoic expression, his arms crossed in a tight shield in front of his chest, and his hair smoothed back in a quiff. It’s a bit of a culture shock to see the same man who’s looked the same for over a decade suddenly show up to Mark’s house, hair a half-assed attempt to settle a tousled bedhead, dressed in a faded college sweater and loose set of joggers. 

But it’s not unwelcome, “No,” Mark says, finally ceding to himself and leaning back into the sofa cushion, “If you’re willing to let me into your house whenever you want, then I’m willing to do the same to you.”

The two of them aren’t friends. They’re work aquaintances at best, and a protegé-mentor partnership at worst, but Mark allows himself to feel comfortable and let the coach into his house. Not only because he trusts the other, but because the resounding emptiness of the concealed sheen of all the blinding metals and whites is overwhelming.

“So, why’d you drop by?” Mark asks after a few minutes of unbearable silence.

“Do you really want to know? It’s a long story” something scrapes at the coach’s gravelly voice, the result of which is an apparent strain that struggles to reach Mark’s ears. Still, Mark nods, curious, “Okay, before you, I had another student who was around your age now… maybe a little younger. 

“Watching her skate was dazzling, and I knew I couldn’t offer her much, but she stuck around with me and refused to get another coach,” the coach let out a wet laugh, running his hands over his face as Mark sits in petrified silence, unprepared for the resulting breakdown, “God, she refused to get another coach…”

There’s something so distinctly humanizing, so disturbingly foreign about seeing the strongest figure in his life crumbling onto Mark’s hardwood, leaving a residue of remorseful rubble in its wake, and Mark can’t do anything to stop it. 

So the coach continues, “She didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to see her go, but I had to. I had to watch her fall apart before she finally let go,” Mark can’t bear to look his coach in the eyes as said male lifts his teary gaze to meet Mark’s own, “She was eating away at herself until she no longer existed.”

No amount of social interaction could prepare Mark for comforting his superior when he can’t even comfort himself. But he tries, “Is… is that why..?”

The coach seems to understand, blinking away the tears, “Yes, it’s why I was so scared when I found out…,” and, seeing Mark’s guilty look, the coach has to come in and mitigate that worry, “But it’s not your fault I was reminded of her. It’s the fifth anniversary of her passing.”

He tries to throw on a sympathetic smile and says, “Vincent, I’m so sorry you’ve gone through this,” Mark deigns not to mention his own contribution to this trauma.

Mark wants to throw up. 

~~

Despite always having considered eating a chore, Mark never stops to think of all the time he’s wasted staring at the scale, or straightening himself after a particularly strong headrush, or isolating himself from the world that doesn’t need to think of him as anything other than just another figure skater. 

So when he finally tries to get better, he doesn’t feel like anything gets easier. He doesn’t find freedom from recovering, he finds himself trapped. He finds himself relapsing into old habits without realizing it. Skipping past his half-empty cabinets in favor of opening his empty fridge, giving up at the sight of it, and dragging his feet back into bed. Ignoring every text or phone call or notification that rattles his phone on the bedside table. 

And then he remembers Jackson. How his panicked friend appeared at the doorway of the hospital, his heavy breathing nearly twice as fast as Mark’s startled heart rate. Frenzied motions of concern before even speaking a single word, scrambling to Mark’s side as his coach leaves calmly. 

He remembers his coach’s terribly tragic anecdote. The loosely strung calm before the breakdown. The panicked concern hidden beneath a well-kept monotone.

But then he remembers his parents. His sisters, his brother. Not once has he even spoken to them since he was finally old enough to move out of the house. And, though he won’t admit it to anyone, he misses them. His parents, who threw him into the sport once they discovered his infinitesimal iota of skill at merely standing upright in the skates without falling once and severed his connections from each of his siblings. His siblings he’s never been able to fully connect with. Mark wants to believe Jackson and Vincent are his family, but they can never get on the same level as being connected by blood. 

Mark has to watch the control his parents relinquished for him, that he merely grabbed at once, drift further into the air where he can’t possibly reach it. But he misses his blood relatives even if they don’t feel like a family. 

He takes out his phone, brandishing it at the pace of a snail, and scrolls through his limited list of contacts. He hesitates over his brother’s phone number, not sure if the young man has the same number as when he first got it the day he left home, not sure if the young man would even want to speak to him. 

His finger gravitates towards Jackson’s instead, and he panics momentarily.

“ _Hey, Mark, you aren’t going to just creepily breathe down the mic like last time, right?_ ” Jackson jokes right as Mark’s about to take the phone away from his face and give up.

“What should I do?” Mark asks, at a loss for what else to ask in this situation. 

Understanding the not too subtle panic in Mark’s voice, the sound of a chair squeaking under the weight of a person sounds before Jackson asks, “ _What’s up?_ ”

“I-I don’t know. It’s been, like, six, seven years since I talked to my brother—to anyone in my family, and I’ve been denying it for, like, forever now, but I miss them.”

Mark’s tempted to hang up when the silence goes on for just a bit too long, but then Jackson responds with another question, “ _What happened?_ ”

Now Mark knows he’s being purposefully dodgy, walking along the tangent line just to barely reference the question at hand, and avoid it altogether. He hesitates, looking down at his nervously picked at hangnails and his dry fingers, thinking to moisturize, before finally remembering there was a question at hand, “I never really knew anyone in my family even though we lived in the same… house. But now that I’m gone, and I’m on my own, I miss them.”

“ _Don’t feel bad for missing the people you grew up with, even if they never felt too familiar. You can’t control how your brain functions,_ ” Jackson pauses, huffing through the phone before, “ _Here, I’m not the best person to be taking advice from, but try to connect with someone in your family. If they feel the same, then that’s great! And if they don’t, don’t beat yourself up too hard over it. You can just go back to life as planned._ ”

Mark nods to himself and admits in a rare form of unadulterated honesty and fear, “I’m scared to talk to them.”

“ _Do you want me to come over?_ ” Jackson asks after a considerable amount of shuffling on the other end, “ _I can help call if you want._ ”

On one hand, Mark really needs that moral support, but on the other hand, Mark doesn’t want to reveal how dysfunctional Mark’s personal life is. How much Mark would rather do anything than to be here, but how much he loves Jackson’s company. He answers with a, “Yes,” after only a beat of silence. 

“ _Sure, when do you want to do it, now?_ ” Mark can barely hear it over himself, why is he so willing to reveal increments of his truth when he can’t even begin to think of doing it with Vincent? He thinks it’s probably his and Vincent’s decade of knowing each other so there’s no need for any ice breakers like revealing some hint of truth to the other like he’s announcing it to the world. 

“Yeah, now, why not?” Marks blurts out through his thrumming anxiety. He clicks his tongue, not to get Jackson’s attention, but because he’s shaking in an abject yet somehow morose terror.

Jackson’s reply is somehow no less eager to help Mark, despite the shock evident in his voice as he says, “ _Really, now? Sure, I’ll be over as fast as I can._ ”

And, true to his word, Jackson knocks sharply on Mark’s door a few minutes later, looking somehow more exhausted than Mark, nearly keeling over right at the front door, “Sorry, I walked here. And no, I obviously didn’t run, it was just really windy out.”

There’s that hint of played out seriousness that points to flat sarcasm, and despite his nervousness, Mark lets out a chuckle, though it’s looser, more free than anything he laughed at before. Somehow, Jackson picks up on this. Jackson smiles too, laughing shakily through quick breaths, “It’s so nice to see you smile like that.”

Mark’s smile drops for a second before he replaces it with his tightlipped performance smile, “What do you mean?”

“I haven’t seen you smile like that in so long.”

Mark doesn’t feel happy. He’s shaking from the inside-out. But for Jackson to tell him he doesn’t seem as nervous as he feels, there must be something he’s missing about his own actions.

“Really?” Mark asks, flushing under this sudden attention, his face neutral again. He avoids Jackson’s eyes, aiming for the nose and lower, and despite no longer being able to see the calculating glace in clear view, he can still feel the burning of the stare and he can still see Jackson’s attractive features without such an integral part of beauty. 

Mark remembers why he lost connection with Jackson. Not because he moved away or because ice skating became a full time hobby, but this strange attraction that had manifested into alluring yet thickly sticky sin where he reaches out for a taste, and gets trapped in the web. 

“I’m gay,” he blurts out impulsively, especially when he sees Jackson’s face approach, so stuck in the moment that he can’t tell if he’s the one moving, or if it’s Jackson.

Jackson’s ramrod straight, his thousand yard stare giving Michaelangelo’s Moses a run for its money. And for a second, Mark can see his own terrible habits in Jackson’s reaction and he feels awful. Not because he’s scared Jackson’s suffering through the same thing he’s suffering through, but because he doesn’t want anyone to experience the indelible sensation of being trapped in himself, the cage growing smaller by the second until the pain eventually stops, and he’s no more. 

Mark’s just projecting his confliction onto his poor, unsuspecting friend. Jackson isn’t suffering like him. There’s no anguished cry in desperation to be saved, especially not when the younger man finally responds, “Yeah? I… am too? Are we going to call”

Mark sighs, making a running start for his goal before backing down again, “Can we—uh, can we just talk for now?”

Jackson’s immovable half-smile drops if not by a millimeter before opening up into a full smile, “Well, you know how there are never any high level skaters renting out the entire rink when you’re not here. Today, we got a new skater. And now we have to move all the kids back into the other rink until we fix the schedules again.”

“Really? Do you know who?”

“Nah, he’s just some kid that comes around for a bit of extra practice. I don’t even think he began working for any competition.”

“Wow… and you thought I was the most inconvenient,” Mark laughs to himself, slipping back to a nearly catatonic nervousness where all he can think of is how he can even begin to approach his brother again when he’s such an outsider.

“Alright, I can see my amazing conversation skills aren’t doing anythin’. What can I do?”

“Fine, I think I’m finally ready to call, I guess,” Mark admits, stalling if not by a few seconds.

Jackson’s face is uncharacteristically serious, his sharp eyebrows furrowing, “If you’re ready, go ahead, I’ll be here if you need me,” and the expression fades just as quickly as it fell on his face.

Mark palms his phone from the coffee table, and he scrolls down to his brother’s name. In an instant, Mark is stuck between crossroads, where both tracks have trains quickly approaching, and he has to choose the path that causes the least damage. He thinks to himself, hitting pause and never calling leaves him in a terribly sour Schrodinger’s cat situation where he doesn’t know how his family feels about him, but choosing either path will inevitably result in some amount of collateral damage. 

With Jackson’s reassuring look, Mark’s pushed over the edge, and he calls the number that may or may not be up to date.

Waiting is the worst part, where it’s too late to turn back, but the dread is palpable. His heartbeat thumps out of his chest as he instinctively grabs onto Jackson’s hand, not even noticing the sweat pouring down his forehead and further down. All Mark can hear is the impossibly slow calling tone as he waits. 

Then it stops, “Hello?” and Mark’s breaking down.

~~

The crushing guilt atop Mark’s frail body sends him downward where the only relief is the soft scratch of a blade, carving out nonsense into beauty never before documented or seen in this form. Never the same as the last time, but the idea of beauty remains. 

But as Mark tries to talk to his brother without collapsing in on himself, Jackson’s warm grasp keeps him sitting as he reconnects a broken relationship. Mark relaxes into the body next to him, breathing with the soft breaths next to him, his heart slowing to the same thump on his back. 

“Do _they_ miss me?” Mark asks, his voice so frail, it nearly breaks when its waves connect to the surfaces around him. Especially after the brief _I miss you_ ’s of long-term separation, Mark’s scared to know about the rest of his family. Namely, his parents.

“ _No… none of us have really spoken to them since we left the house_ ,” his brother, Joey, says, apologetically.

“Is it wrong of me to miss them?” Mark asks, more to himself than to his brother, knowing too much for him to stomach. 

“ _What? Sure they weren’t the best, and it feels wrong, but it’s not. You’re not evil for missing the people who’ve given you a home for so much of your life,_ ” the younger boy pauses, his voice growing less confident, “ _But we can still get over it, right? We can get over them and start our dream lives, right?_ ”

Mark makes out a short, “Yeah,” and looks back at Jackson, sinking into the warmth a little further.

“ _I’m getting off track, but you get it, right? Just because you miss bad people, it doesn’t make you a bad person too._ ”

Something irks Mark with what his brother’s saying, something that he doesn’t know, “What’d they do to you..?”

“ _They didn’t_ do _anything to me. I was the only kid without anything particularly special aside from my grades. So now I’m a bit of a business major, which is crazy stupid because I wanted to be an English major,_ ” Joey chuckles drily to himself, “ _They originally wanted me to be a law student since I sucked at all things S.T.E.M., but this was the closest compromise. ‘Cause law’s too much work, y’know?_ ”

“Yep, that’s our parents, alright,” Mark points out flatly, rubbing his face raw beneath his free hand.

“ _Hell yeah_ ,” the line goes silent. For one, two, three, four, five seconds, which feels closer to minutes than seconds, there is but exchanged breathing from both sides before the younger man breaks the silence, “ _I’m really glad you called, Mark. Now I can finally brag to my friends that my brother’s a famous person._ ”

Mark can’t help but laugh, feeling Jackson’s gaze on him in surprise, “Yeah, go ahead. I give you full permission to show off how cool of a failed figure skating brother you have.”

“ _Wait, what do you mean? How’d you fail?_ ”

Now Mark just can’t keep his mouth shut for one second these days. He thinks to remind himself of how far he’s fallen from the ice-cold yet svelte figure skater who never spoke beyond the bare technical terms and facts about himself and the performance. He sits up from where he and Jackson are on the and desperately looks to Jackson for support, who tries to smile encouragingly through the confused furrow of his eyebrows. 

“God, is that all you got from that? Uh… It’s nothing serious, but… I got hospitalized earlier this year,” Mark trails off, looking up at the ceiling, and breathes in and out before he can even contemplate finishing the answer, “uh, and… they said Ihadaneatingdisorder.”

Tepidity invades Mark’s blood, dyeing his veins an ice cold vicar, the sensation ripping at his skin until it spills onto his pristine white walls. And as the haunting fog of silence spreads through the speaker of his phone and into his stagnant house, the vicar stings.

“ _Well, how are you feeling now?_ ” the younger man asks in a non-segue, but it’s strangely comforting. To know his brother wouldn’t just abandon Mark for showing weakness, despite the propensity of their parents to do so. 

“I’m good… better, y’know? I’ve got a few people that really support me.” 

“ _It’s amazing you have people who support and want to help you, but just know you have us. Me, Tammy, and Grace. Let’s meet up soon, alright?_ ” Mark can’t help but smile at his brother’s words before the younger speaks again, “ _I don’t imagine our parents would be as excited, but who knows? Maybe it’ll be cathartic to confront them? I don’t know. Don’t force yourself._ ”

“Yeah, that sounds great,” Mark responds, smiling softly to himself. 

Even when Mark visibly relaxes into a perfectly natural conversation with his brother, Jackson’s comforting presence just beside Mark is still incredibly useful for the underlying stress flowing through his body with residual adrenaline. 

And it’s a warmth that resounds even after Mark ends the call, and they just sit there, breathing in the air. Mark’s no longer breathless.

~~

It develops almost naturally after Mark and Jackson spend a night together, quelling stress into scented candles and junk food that manages to fill his house. The food is less for him than it is for Jackson, but it’s made up for with floral candles that manage to fill the cold hollowness with a nostalgic warmth he’s never experienced before.

Mark shouldn’t be nostalgic for something that never happened, but with what he knows about the typical nuclear family and the awkwardness, the fights, the recuperation, and the love; he feels that sense of normalcy he’s never felt before however atypical his situation is. 

And eventually it comes to a point where one day, a few days after the first time they spend the night together, and him and Jackson are wordlessly watching a movie, with a bowl of barely seasoned popcorn between the two of them and a small box of candy on Jackson’s other side, Mark thinks about how much he loves Jackson and how much he cherishes moments like these, where they’re silently watching a terrible movie, and they’re enjoying it together. 

“I love you,” Mark says quietly, as a lull in the movie breaks whatever tension that was meant to be established in nonsensical dialogue. And the silence that follows, above the residual awkwardness of the pregnant silence in the film that lasts for far too long, is terrifyingly ominous, oppressing the awkward silence immediately upon contact.

Jackson looks at Mark, moving the popcorn bowl aside gingerly, and cups his face, “I love you too.”

~~

Strangely enough, after fully relinquishing all his control to the hands of his coach and Jackson (and now his siblings) to eventually allow him back onto the ice, and losing all he knows in the process, Mark doesn’t feel as tormented as he thought he would. Whether it’s because he actually does feel better, or because he’s just become used to the feeling, it doesn’t matter because, to expedite the process, Mark ends up going to a therapist. 

And Mark’s immediately on edge because of that. When he walks in the first day, it’s almost a walk of shame as he has to admit to himself that he has a problem, and that just because he loves Jackson and relishes the support of his coach and his siblings, it doesn’t mean he’s accomplished anything. 

He’s gripping his hands together in a vice, kneading his bones against each other like they’re malleable beneath the perspiration that’s practically pouring down his hands at this point. He also can’t tell if it’s his legs weakening as he tries to take the steps against his very brain into the room. 

Doubly nerve-racking is the impossibly slow passage of time as Mark walks to the sharp gaze of dark eyes above a set of wire-rim glasses that perch perfectly on the bridge of an angular nose. The woman can’t be anywhere above Mark’s height, even with the high heels, yet at the sight of her, Mark wants to run back to the comforts of his newly warm home. But he thinks about Jackson, who’s waiting on the other side of the door; his coach, who’s rooting for him to get back on the ice; and his siblings, who’re excited to cheer their brother on in something so much bigger than any of them can imagine; and Mark forces himself down in the seat across from the therapist. 

They get past basic introductions, and the nerves don’t sink. Mark doesn’t think they ever will. But he forgets the most dreaded part. The explanation. He’s already done the same to his brother, who he’s known since the younger was born, and again to his other siblings when they inevitably met up, and he tentatively stepped around his problems until he either blurted it out or he was pushed to do so. 

Long story short, Mark’s afraid of admitting all the things he’s been avoiding for so long, side-stepping at the mere mention. And he doesn’t know if he can get his personal trauma out to this stranger he’s paying to help him, especially if he can’t even begin to tell himself about it too. 

He does eventually, although it takes an embarrassing amount of time and a bit more pleading than he’d like to admit. From whom, he also isn’t willing to tell. No matter what, Mark gets his story wrung out of him like a towel being twisted tightly in the wrath of his new therapist, his words flowing from him in a deluge of his past regrets.

When Mark leaves his first appointment, he’s nearly in a state of catatonic numbness where he can barely remember his time in the room, but he feels the passage of the entire hour he was with the therapist like it was several years longer than it actually was. 

“How was it?” Jackson had asked, and Mark didn’t answer, only embracing Jackson with whatever adrenaline that had yet to have escaped his body. And that’s all he used to explain his thoughts before he eventually had to return a week later.

The next week came. As did the next. Next. Next. Next. Before Mark feels even the slightest bit comfortable with the woman. Even so, he feels more able to relay his thoughts and feelings, but not necessarily lighter on his feet. 

Mark was only ever sure of one thing. That when he stepped on the scale with an empty stomach and looked at the number above his blistered feet, he was in control of that number. If he wanted it to go up, he could make it do so, and if he wanted it to drop, he could manipulate it to his will. 

And now that he’s doing what’s supposedly good for him, he’s been thrown into retrograde where the one thing he knew had been torn away from him within the course of a few weeks. What he’s developed for years has been revoked in a simple hospital visit. 

Is he really getting better? He doesn’t know.

~~

Mark doesn’t feel as agile. He feels like a stranger stepping onto the ice for the first time when Vincent finally lets him back onto the ice after a surprisingly casual phone call giving Mark the okay to return to skating. 

Skating in laps around the rink, Mark allows himself to relax for a second, remember the fragments of his routine and piece it together with what music he still has embedded in his brain, and motions them to his soft hum. 

“It’s nice to see you’re having fun,” Vincent says suddenly, leaning over the barrier, a smile on his face. 

“Yeah, I’m just trying this on for size, y’know? Gotta warm up before I can do anything,” Mark replies, sliding his feet along the ice like a poorly coded walk cycle. 

“Ah, I see you have learned from your blunders of the past,” the coach says, looking down a list, “But, I’m not going to throw you head first into the program again. Keep warming up, I’ll tell you what we’re doing later.”

Mark’s spent so long away from the ice that the soft chill of the overhead fans sends shivers down his spine, and the numbness that’s already begun to settle in his feet makes him feel more like a baby giraffe roller skating across a busy road. 

But to feel so weighed down, not by his past, but by the recent changes to his life, Mark picks his toe in the ice behind him as he glides down the long side of the rink in apprehension. He doesn’t know where to start again. He’s strayed too far away from his initial predetermined path, and now he has to pave his own with nothing more than the guidance he’s received. 

The air is cold against his loose jacket, the extra fabric fluttering against his skin when he picks up speed. It’s an incredible inconvenience when Mark can grab hold of parts of his sleeve when he’s reaching forward to pull his foot in when he tries for a mushroom spin and when he feels physically slowed from the barely there air resistance on the batwing-like piece of fabric between his arms and his body, but he and Vincent both ignore it.

With Vincent looking over from across the rink, the icy blue eyes don’t seem to cool down the temperature anymore, so Mark quickly skates back to the man and grins “Let’s go,”

~~

It’s so immensely foreign when Mark sees all these teenagers excitedly looking around at the rink, their eyes nearly sparkling in pure ecstasy, Mark presumes as he sips on his iced coffee, barely able to rub the exhaustion out of his eyes while these teenagers (note, the ones that are bouncing off the walls, not the ones that are just as exhausted as him), and Mark just feels so impossibly old. He’s never remembered being so happy before, so the resulting jadedness may add to that, but it doesn’t bother him. 

The kids raring to go on the ice before the zamboni can even get off look immensely more professional than Mark, the senile old man who, despite wearing proper skating attire, looks more like a coach than anyone else. 

He flashes a quick smile to any of the skaters that pass by, who either recognize Mark from his work in previous events or want to meet new people along the way. 

“Why don’t you go warm up?” Jackson asks from beside him, looking standing up just as straight as Mark, watching as the competitors skate around. 

Mark shakes his head, “Nah, in trying times like these, there must be better methods to practice without so many people. Which is why I’m looking for anyone I recognize from last time.”

Jackson arches his neck just to look Mark in the eye, who’s towering over Jackson now that Mark’s wearing his skates, and responds in a lilting excitement that manages to meld his barely there accent into a genuine curiosity, “Aw, but aren’t you excited to skate?”

“Well yeah, duh. But it’s too early to even think about that.”Mark has to remind himself that he hasn’t even gotten into the event yet, he’s only trying out for a chance to get in. But at least Jackson’s there to make it more exciting than any other audition process he’s gone through before. 

It’s not a long process he has to sit through. Individually, the skaters show their performance and their skill, and then they can just leave for the day and wait patiently for a phone call or email or text message or whatever to get information for the next step. Mark’s went through this before, and all he knows is that the wait is the worst part. Not skating beneath the gaze of three emotionless judges, scribbling words on the paper with nothing more than stoic impassivity whenever Mark’s vision is no longer just level blurriness.

The fear of rejection isn’t the scariest part, it’s the audience watching. Failure isn’t the most terrifying thing, it’s people watching him fail and rot. And, looking over to Jackson, who’s watching the skaters warm up, Mark doesn’t know whether he fears Jackson watching or if he welcomes the added support. 

He doesn’t know.

~~

“So, did anything new happen over the last few weeks? I know you haven’t been here in a while,” the therapist asks when Mark returns, his sudden jubilance a far cry from his aloof hesitance last time he was there.

“I wasn’t here, what was it, a week, two weeks ago? Regardless, it was because I actually went to a tryout for skating,” Mark says, fiddling with the bottom hem of his shirt, almost embarrassed to continue on about his figure skating career. 

“Right, you told me about that, how was it?”

“Yeah, it was good. I brought my… my friend for support,” Mark scratches the back of his neck, “It was a lot more fun with him and my coach.”

“I’m glad you’re leaning on your friends for support.”

Mark doesn’t go into depth about the details of the audition because, quite frankly, it’s rather boring to explain in an impromptu epic about conquering fears with the help of others close to his heart. 

The session continues, but Mark’s thoughts don’t. Does he feel guilty for calling Jackson just his friend? Surely he shouldn’t, they’ve not established a firm step at which their relationship sits yet, but he feels his stomach drop in the same sick, perpetual agony of feeling so far away from reality that his vision bends into vague shapes that crumble around him until he’s stuck in his own personal purgatory.

He pockets the strange overflow of emotions and zeroes in on the woman in front of him, listening half-heartedly when the emotion bleeds from where it’s been concealed. 

Pocketing his uncertainty for the moment, Mark thinks about bringing it up as he watches the therapist’s expressive gesticulation. He decides to talk about it with Jackson later.

~~  
  


It’s not often that Mark has the time for introspection. Even now, he doesn’t. As he’s waiting, looking up at the screen in front of him, he’s huddled in a thick jacket as the gentle winds of the door opening and closing rattles the doldrums of his corner until it strikes him head-on, he finds his mind drifting away from the event in front of him. 

He thinks about his siblings who’ve recently rallied to support him. He thinks about Vincent, who’s been by his side since he started skating. And he thinks of Jackson. A friend who’s grown into something more meaningful, something more intimate. 

And as he reflects on his relationships and how he’s connected to these people more than he ever has in his entire life, he can’t help but to imagine what more he could do. If he could’ve reconnected with his parents, his lost friends from way too long ago. Or if he could’ve been nicer to people who approach him with the knowledge of who he is. 

Parts of him wishes he never could’ve put himself out there. When he breaks, he’s exposed, cracked open and broken. Scarred and naked. It’s the fear of walking outside and feeling indelibly and uncomfortably open and knowing someone out there knows who he is and what he’s doing. 

Once he put himself out there, his actions can’t be undone. And when he was at his worst and he wanted to disappear so badly, he would look at his social media and wonder how long he’d have to be gone for the few devotees to everything he does to accept his long-term absence. How long it would take for anyone to notice if he were to disappear. 

But now that he’s already built up from his lowest point, he can’t seem to scrape past that mentality, wondering if anyone can see through his current state to his past. He knows he’s changed. He knows he isn’t the same person he was when he started practicing for now. He just doesn’t feel it.

Many days, when he’s alone—Jackson and his coach are busy, and his siblings are either in school or working, his temptations are almost too difficult to ignore.

The tantalizing grasp of relapse reaches out to him from above, offering to grant him the pretense of effortless perfection that promises to bring him to comfort when he feels so out of his depth. And he knows better. He knows not to allow relapse to take him by the hand and take him away from himself, not because he feels better not taking that offer his brain throws out there, but because he can feel the disappointment of everyone who’s helped support him thus far. 

And Mark has to swallow his pride and keep his head straight as he walks the tightrope to recovery, and ignore the helicopter above him offering to fly him to safety and the resulting winds blowing harshly on his body, tugging him down either side until he’s almost teetering off the rope. 

In the phase between his full rehabilitation and his struggle period, Mark wishes he could feel some sense of normalcy that seems so foreign to his life. He watches these skaters walk past him, and they’re almost all in the midst of their pubescent maturity and childish excitement, and he wonders where he went wrong. 

If his parents treated him less like a slave to the art and more like a son, would it have been better? If he had learnt to deal with isolation? If he had tried connecting with his close ones before he drifted away? He doesn’t want to know the certainty at which he’s at the short end of the stick, so he doesn’t imagine in what ways he could’ve prevented all this struggle he can’t seem to escape. Especially not with the withdrawals from his bad habits.

But hindsight is much clearer than his current vision. Realizing his mistakes didn’t give him the answers for further prevention. It didn’t open up the solutions to his problems once he realized everything he caused to himself. 

Addiction became a disease without Mark realizing, and, finally taking his rose-colored glasses off, Mark had to face and overcome it. Purging his emotions for so long, Mark couldn’t find a way to deal with the pool of his feelings while feeling so inexplicably empty. He felt like he couldn’t get past it. 

But now, as Mark huddles further into himself while minding the ruffles and the skin-tight costume that’s stretching around his sitting form on the benches especially with his knees tucked close to his chest, he wonders how far he actually came from his loathsome emotionlessness. 

The door opens and closes again, and Mark can’t feel the breeze. The flicker of overhead lights. Mark closes his eyes. 

He leans his head back and swallows thickly, wondering if he can ever breathe clearly like this. It’s like his chest is caving in, each rib weighing down on his lungs and grappling them until he’s struggling to breathe under the pressure. And he looks straight, letting out a breath without releasing the tension.

Mark doesn’t feel different, but he knows something changed. He’s never been nervous around the other skaters sitting on the benches around him. But now he feels strangely exposed, like all these other young men know what he’s gone through and they internally judge him for that. He lets out a tremulous sigh and huddles deeper into his jacket. And under those undetectable but unbearably overwhelming stares, Mark’s dropping down from thousands of miles in the air, his weight under the gravity knocking the breath out of his body.

Mark knows he’s gotten better, much more so than before, but at this moment, none of it matters. And all he wants to do is stop and breathe.

~~

The ice is cold and lonely when Mark skates onto the ice, every other person separated from him by a thick layer of plexiglass. He stops just next to a particularly large skid atop the ice, matted down by the loosened snow from the other skaters. 

An announcement plays through the stadium, but he can’t hear it through the echo on the tall ceiling. There’s a brief cheer before Mark settles in his beginning position, and the music begins its somber and sparse start before, after the first few bars pass with a low, slowly growing hum of strings, Mark skates backwards, each edge feeling like an eternity before turns forward off the outside edge, skating gently into a sedate scratch spin as the slow instrumental begins to build.

As the music grows more animated, more lush, and Mark does as well. He kicks up off the ground when the full orchestra comes in, and revolves once, twice, three and a half times before he lands right as the music halts in devastating silence. His hands lift up into the air with a flourish he’s never possessed in the past, and the music comes back in. 

He lutzes as the passage transforms into gentle plucking, and follows it by driving his foot back into the ice and counting, one, two, three, before following it up with the same jump. 

Arms wide as he skates forward around the subtle outlines of a logo hidden barely by the scuff marks pockmarking the ice, he turns backwards and braces for the first spin of his program. A camel spin into a tight sit spin, the spotlights lights dizzying as they settle on Mark’s spinning form. 

He skates out of the spin, and turns forward again only to promptly turn backwards again to enter a bauer, leaning so far backwards, he can see the audience behind him, to finally skate forwards. As the music grows louder, and without relenting, Mark’s moves have to match that, so he extends his arms out as he turns backwards again, and crosses his left leg over his right into a quadruple loop, revolving one, two, three, four times, landing for a split second before dropping his toepick into the ground into a double flip.

The hint of piano becomes percussion as it drives the song forward and faster, just as Mark jumps into a back camel, shaking slightly before Mark releases, and braces. 

When the music is at its loudest, Mark drives his body up, and twists around. 

One, two, three, four and a half. 

He nearly falls flat onto the same divot at which he lands, but he continues, his arm movements flowing from his shoulders to his fingertips, as he turns forwards, skating in a curved line before he jumps again, a quad-double loop-loop combination. In the fleeting moments of cacophonous yet surprisingly flowing instrumental, he fits in a triple axel before he glides into the fading music.

In deafening silence, Mark approaches the same spot at which he started, grabs his blade behind his head, and spins. It’s held for a bar before Mark returns to his beginning position, and listens as the remains of the music hums like a feather drifting to the ground.

Through the various stuffed animals being thrown down from the crowd, he catches a glimpse of Jackson, and he’s instantly breathless, just at the mere sight of his significant other cheering him on alongside his siblings. In an instant, he’s floating through a vacuum, looking at Jackson in stunned awe. Jackson gives him a bright smile accompanied by a shy wave, and Mark’s released.

The distant yet loud cheering and the icy air dripping his perspiration down his warm skin in a slightly chilled sweat cut through the fog that’s surrounded his brain for years like a knife. He can finally breathe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much if you read this entire thing. it took about four months to write and has only been read (and proofread) by the watchful eyes of a sleep deprived teenager, so thank you if you actually made it through that.  
> 
> 
> skip this next part if you really don't care about why i wrote this (because it's probably just as boring as the rest of this, lmao). 
> 
> so i've skated for most of my life now and quit a few months back, but i've been trying to write something with ice skating in it as far back as 2017. and what inspired me to do it 3 years later? a creative writing essay about overcoming hardships. 
> 
> the essay was basically a reflection on my identity as an asian in a primarily white area (it was about 95%, i believe) and trying to conform, a major reason for why i decided to continue skating: because so many other kids my age were doing something interesting, i just had to. but when i grew up and got the opportunity to form myself into adolescence, i had to grapple my lack of identity and control over my life, even if i got myself into that situation. and i turned to controlling my eating habits. (i had never been particularly proud to know how to skate, so i guess that also went down the drain for me too, in fact, i never told anyone i did it, anyway) 
> 
> *** i’m making an edit here to say that i wasn’t exactly eating disordered in the traditional sense of anorexia, bulimia, or even binge eating disorder, but it was still disordered eating. (i could really go on about osfed, but i won’t for your sake)
> 
> obviously there's a lot more that goes into people's choices that lead to an eating disorder and disordered eating, but that was the main theme of that essay and my over-simplification of the actual disorder and the process in getting one to get it down to a thousand words. (that was the most i could fit into about four pages, double spaced. and i used the full four pages) 
> 
> the themes of that essay are also reflected in this fanfiction, but instead of trying to deal with conformity, Mark's struggling to deal with somewhat neglectful parents and isolation by trying to find control in a life where everything was forced onto him at a young age.
> 
>   
> finally, i in no way want to romanticize eating disorders. and obviously, not all eating disorders are the same as the one depicted here. eating disorders, like other mental illnesses are not black and white, and people suffer in different ways, but that doesn't undermine the severity of any case. 
> 
> if you actually read this, thank you. i hope you're staying safe and sane in the current situation we're in.


End file.
